Hard to Hold
by the.goal.is.greatness
Summary: There are two things harder than making an after dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning towards you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you. [Alcide x Sookie] [5x1]


**Title:** Hard to Hold  
**Genre:** Romance / Humor  
**Rating:** M  
**Pairing:** Alcide x Sookie  
**Spoilers:** N/A  
**Summary:** There are two things harder than making an after dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning towards you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.  
**Word Count:** 3,225  
**Warnings:** Literal crack. [Alternative title: "5 Times Alcide Ruined a Kiss and 1 Time it Actually Worked"]

**Disclaimer:** _Southern Vampire Mysteries_ belongs to Charlaine Harris. Summary is a quote by Winston Churchill.

**A/N:** I'm writing this under duress. Alcide is hot.

* * *

1.

They're sitting on Sookie's porch after a particularly grueling day (and aren't all of their days they wind up spending together just like that). Some upstart shifter from two counties over had decided Bon Temps was an _excellent_ place to take over the local pack and wandered in all cocksure and arrogant. Alcide managed to take care of him in basically a minute, but then his little lackeys had shown up to jump him all at once. Cowards.

Luckily, one of those little lackeys had a little human girlfriend who had lunch that afternoon in Merlotte's. And luckily, one of the waitresses at said bar was an in incredibly gifted telepath who, though she didn't like to eavesdrop, had zeroed in on the thought of _My baby is gonna fuck that Alcide Herveaux up real good_ and ran to the rescue with a shotgun and a smile. (Well, it was really more of a grimace, but in the end, Sookie had blasted several rounds of buckshot through his would-be usurpers and saved the day, the pack, and Alcide's ass.)

"Werewolf politics sure are confusing." He started and turned to her, realizing she had been speaking for a while. When she saw his questioning look, she continued. "I mean, anyone can just come and fight you and take over your pack and if they win everyone just goes along with it?"

He shrugged. "It's not much different than the European monarchies a few hundred years ago, is it?"

"I guess." She frowned and even that was pretty.

Alcide was staring at her, imaging how she'd looked like an avenging angel in her waitress uniform, brandishing a gun, hair wild from her speedy drive over. It was such an inappropriate time to get a boner, but, well, he was just a man.

"Alcide?"

"Um…" _Say something, you idiot! Thank her!_ "I…" She was staring at him expectantly, blue eyes shining. "That was… pretty cool… what you did…" _Really smooth, Herveaux_.

"Oh, it was nothing," she shrugged it off. "At least I didn't have to kill anyone this time. Or hit anyone with my car."

He grinned wryly at that. "Well if it's to save my ass, you're welcome to do both anytime." He was leaning closer, as she looked at him. Was she tilting her face up towards him? Bolstering his courage, he moved to close that last several inches and press his lips to hers.

A car rumbled up the driveway and Sookie turned her head to look, so he planted his lips firmly against her cheek instead.

He felt her stiffen in surprise. _Shit! Do something!_ "Well, thanks again, little cowgirl," he said with a laugh, like he'd meant to kiss her on the cheek all along. Standing, he ruffled her hair affectionately. _Yup, totally what I meant to do. Friendly Alcide, just a friendly kiss on the cheek._ She relaxed. _You're an idiot, Herveaux_.

* * *

2.

"I am still not certain as to why you are here, dog."

Alcide glanced over the rim of his beer at the icy gaze of Eric Northman. He grinned, wolfish and charming at the Viking. They both knew why Alcide was here. It was because Eric had requested Sookie's presence at some big meeting at Fangtasia, which meant the bar was filled with all manner of shifters and vamps and fairies and humans and if Eric thought for one minute Alcide was leaving Sookie there alone he was out of his mind. "Oh, just wanted to show my support."

A narrow-eyed glare. "How positively… _rural_ of you," Eric sneered.

"Hey ya'll, how's it going?"

Both men straightened imperceptibly at the cheerful voice, and eyed each other in chauvinistic wariness. "Sookie," Eric purred and Alcide bristled at the tone. He'd at a thousand years to perfect that tone and it irked Alcide the way it immediately made Sookie smile at him. "You look ravishing tonight, as always."

_Damn, I should have told her that_. It was true though. She was wearing a blue and yellow sundress that made her eyes pop and her hair, soft and waving around her shoulders, glow. Her strappy sandals made her legs seem endless and did amazing things to her ass. "Yeah, Sookie, you look really pretty," he was quick to add, earning him a glare from Eric and a shy smile from her.

"Aw, thanks, guys. But you know how uncomfortable these things make me."

"Then allow me to offer you my protection. Come, sit with me."

She rolled her eyes. "You've got bigger problems, Eric. The guy loitering by the bathroom in the horrendous yellow blazer is waiting on a sign from his boss, that vamp with the Mohawk. I think they're planning some kind of coup."

Alcide let his gaze slide over to the guy in question. He looked nervous and kept fidgeting with his phone, and, no joke, his blazer was positively neon. Awful. And definitely up to something. "Looks like you better go deal with that, Northman," he said, meeting the vamp's gaze, eyes glinting in triumph.

Eric glared at him for one long moment, torn between ending a potential bloodbath before it started and leaving Sookie alone with another male. But duty won out in the end and he left, muttering his thanks to Sookie with a lingering kiss to her cheek that made her blush.

"Can I get you a drink?"

"Hm? Oh, I'm not really much of a drinker. I'm more of a sweet tea kind of girl."

He grinned at her. "My kind of girl." He watched with abject fascination as she blushed again. He suddenly felt everything that he could think of to say vanish from his mind and wished, for a moment, that he could be as suave and cool and collected as Eric. "So, how long you gotta stay here and pull recon?" He asked, just for something to fill the silence.

She sighed and leaned up against the bar next to him. He forced his eyes not to stray from her face, even though he knew the angle she was leaning at was pushing her breasts up in a tantalizing way. "I don't know. I guess until all the humans are gone? Wouldn't be much use here after that, would I?" She finished wryly.

He snorted. "I suppose not. Not unless you suddenly started being able to read shifters since the last time I saw ya."

She laughed. "Nope! Your secrets are safe from me, Alcide Herveaux." _Thank God for small favors._ "So if you've got any evil plans to take over the bar or stage an uprising, I'd never know. _No, pretty much I just think about kissing you and making you mine_. She glanced at him so swiftly that for a second he thought she'd been lying and she really _could_ hear his thoughts. "Eric would pretty much work me to death if I could read shifters."

"I'd never let him treat you like that." She blinks at him, and he tries to backpedal. "I mean, not that you're mine to protect or anything, I just meant that… that it wouldn't be fair, and that I wouldn't want that and that I would… help you?"

She blinks again, before breaking into a soft giggle. "My hero," she says, her southern drawl twanging. But her eyes were twinkling.

He's thankful for his darker skin and superior height, it hides the blush threatening to take over his face at the words. "I – "

"No, I mean it." She places a delicate hand on the muscles of his arm and it's a struggle not to flex them, not to show off, not to shiver. "Thank you." She smiles. "That's very sweet of you."

"Sookie, I – " He swallows, sets his beer down, straightens his shoulders, leans down, is inches away…

… and knocks his beer over with his elbow, spilling it down the bar and all over Sookie. He watches in horror as she shoots up, but the damage is done. He frantically starts handing her napkins and apologizing. _Good job, fucking moron._

But she's waving him off, smiling. She doesn't look angry. "It's fine! It's fine! It was just an accident!" She smiles up at him brilliantly and he freezes at the sight. "But would you mind telling Eric that I had to go?"

And Alcide grins, slow and easy. "I would actually _love_ to tell Northman that you left."

* * *

3.

_Stupid, stupid, stupid!_ He thinks, frantically running through the woods. How could they have all been so _stupid_? To leave Sookie, alone, at her house, in the middle of the fucking woods, while they went off to look for the intruder on her property. Has they never meet Sookie? Did they now know that she would follow them, try to help, get herself _immediately_ into a dangerous situation?

They came back to an empty house, door wide open, the smell of shifters that they didn't know everywhere. And Sookie's scent leading them farther and farther into the woods.

He's panting, tongue lolling out of his mouth, ears pricked, nostrils flaring as he scents the air. A collie trots up beside him and sidles up to the huge wolf. Two pairs of canine ears pick up the sound of voices, one familiar, one strange, carrying just slightly over the sound of rushing water. Then, a scream breaks through the air, and they both recognize that voice and shoot off towards it, quick as a flash.

They burst through the woods onto the shore of the river at the same time, eyes sweeping the scene without ever slowing. A man – a shifter, but the scent – by the shore, staring at the bobbing blonde hair that's being swept swiftly downstream. Alcide doesn't slow, never breaks his stride. He hears Sam slam full force into the intruder, hears the man's screaming, but he's still moving, doesn't look back. He takes a leap from the bank with all his strength, and, mid-air lets the change surge through him, until it's a man that dives into the frigid water and starts swimming swiftly towards the girl.

Her head is sinking below the water when he reaches her and pulls her to him. She's as limp as a doll in his hands, but he doesn't stop, keeps moving, heading straight for land, where he pulls her out, lays her flat and immediately pumps twice on her chest, and seals their mouths together.

Sookie coughs and the water expelling from her lungs half goes down his own throat, but she is breathing, she is _breathing!_ He pants as she leans over and expels what seems like half the river from her lungs. When she finally starts to sit up, he reaches out with trembling hands to help her, needing the excuse to touch, to prove that she is okay.

"Th – thank you," she coughs, voice trembling. She looks up at him blearily, hair bedraggled, face pale, eyes blearily. She blinks. "Why are you naked?"

It's such an anticlimactic question after the near-death experience, that the only answer he has is to laugh.

* * *

4.

Alcide wasn't much one for celebrating Christmas, he was usually busy. But Sookie and her friends at the bar were having a party, Sam had even been convinced to close for the evening, and she'd invited him. He knew that Eric and Bill and Sam would all be there and there was no way he was letting that happen without keeping a close eye on the situation.

So here he was, standing awkwardly in the corner, as out of place as a crow among blue jays, just trying to keep an eye on Sookie – a vision is a sparkling green dress.

"Hey there, Alcide, Merry Christmas!"

He jerks. "Merry – merry Christmas, Sookie!" He stammers, straightening up and grinning down at her.

"Are you having a good time?"

_It's better now that you're here_, he thinks, but can't bring himself to say something so romantic. "Uh, yeah, I – "

A drunken patron teeters by, knocking Sookie a step closer to Alcide, so there's only a foot of space between them. "Quit hogging the mistletoe, lovebirds," he slurs and he wavers off.

The pair of them both look up, then back down at each other. Sookie has a delicate blush across the arch of her cheeks and Alcide can only hope his face isn't as red as it feels. "Um…"

She quirks a brow at him. "Tis the season?"

His heart skips a literal beat, how cliché, but honestly, it does. She tilts her chin up in invitation, and Alcide can't believe this is happening that, she's encouraging it.

"Merry fucking Christmas!" Someone screams and suddenly Sookie isn't in front of him but there's a drunken man smacking his lips against Alcide's who can do nothing but stand there dumbfounded. The man wanders off as Sookie laughs.

_I have got to get quicker_…

* * *

5.

It hurts him to remember how much of an actual, honest-to-fuck idiot he is sometimes. Like, some of the things he's done will literally go down in history on the list of worst come-on's ever. He can't even bear to think about them. He's tall. In shape. Good looking. But a big damn, idiot.

So he's just going to block out the memory of that time he bucked up the courage to march over to Sookie, spin her around, and kiss her. Only to realize it wasn't Sookie at all, but her cousin Claude.

Yeah, that definitely, 100% never happened.

Nope.

* * *

+1

New Years was not supposed to go this way, but when did things in Bon Temps ever go the way they were supposed to? First of all, there had been an infestation of positively human-hating fairies who'd shown up from wherever-the-fuck demanding those with "polluted blood" be "eradicated." And while that was going on, some weird ass strain of vamp disease was incapacitating all the resident coffin club members and making them vomit uncontrollably (and since all they ingested was blood it was literally the most disgusting thing anyone had ever seen). So that left it up to the shifters to man down the fort. And on top of all that. It was pouring.

"Thanks." Alcide glanced down at Sookie. "For, you know, saving me from my killer relatives."

He shrugged. "Anytime." They were almost up to her porch now, rain falling in rivets across them, but it was soothing against the injuries they both managed to pick up that evening.

"I don't know what I'd do without you always coming to my rescue."

_I'm sure Northman would be there to lend a fang_.

"I can't trust the vamps," she says. "It's really just the fairy blood that they're after, after all."

She seems so sad that Alcide stops, grasping her wrist to halt her progress, too. He stares down at her earnestly as he speaks. "I don't give two shits about your fairy blood, Sookie. I don't give two shits that you're a telepath." He frowns, trying to form the words that he has always wanted to say. "I like _you_, bad-ass, shot-gun wielding, sweet tea-drinking waitress, Sookie Stackhouse." He can't tell if she's blushing, the rain is too steady. But it is clinging to her eyelashes like gemstones, and she has never looked so beautiful or vulnerable and he –

\- he kisses her.

It is such a sudden movement that it surprises even himself. He thinks he should pull back, but her mouth opens under his with a flower and he's just a man, he can't resist temptation when it's offered up so prettily, so he sweeps his tongue in through that mouth and groans, visceral and wolfish and wild at the taste of her. His hands that are gripping her shoulders, slide up and into that bedraggled mass of hair that he's been dying to be knuckle deep in. Tastes like fresh rain and winter chill and her mouth is a warm cavern and the thought of other places makes him throb hot and heavy in his jeans. He pulls her closer, closer, until there's not a fraction of space between them, just a single line of heat and he can arch the ache between his legs into her stomach and imagine intertwining legs and smooth gliding skin and laving tongues and –

\- She pulls away from him with a strangled gasp, panting harshly.

He's mortified. "I – I'm sorry – I didn't – "

"Oh no you're not," she gasps. "And yes you did." She swallows her panting, trying to catch her breath and failing, as he waits for what she'll say next. "I might not be able to read your mind, Alcide Herveaux," she says, her drawl as smooth as honey, "but I can definitely sense a shifter's emotions."

It takes him a moment to figure out what she means, but when he does, he suddenly remembered every inappropriate moment when the sight of her, the smell of her, sent him from six to midnight in seconds, and with that comes every side-eyed glance she'd sent in his direction. She's _known_ every time he'd been practically rutting against his zipper at the sight of her?! He makes a garbled noise that's part embarrassment, part still heady arousal.

Her answer is to lean farther into him. He knows it's because she's cold, shivering in the downpour that they're still stupidly standing in, but he can't help the jerk his hips give at the motion. Her eyes flutter closed at the sensation and she digs her fingers into the muscles of his arms. He groans.

"Sookie, you have to tell me to leave." She blinks up at him, pupils wide and glazed, and almost can't take it. "Tell me to leave and I will."

"But I – "

"If you don't…" He tugs on her hair, tilting back her head so he can nip and lick and the running water on the column of throat. He reaches down with his opposite hand to grasp her hip so he can pull their hips so close together that it only clothing keeping them from being one person. He wedges a knee in between hers. "If you don't I'm going to fuck you out here, in the rain, and under the sky." She's arching against him, a mass of wet, writhing feeling, rocking against the hard thigh between her legs. "I'll lay you down in the mud and take you right here." Every exhale is a keening whimper as she bucks against him harder, faster, looking for the relief that can't be found without more.

"I – I – "

"And after I do that," he says, pushing up his leg at the same moment his hands drag her down, making her legs straddle his thigh impossibly wide, almost good enough – "I'll never let you go."

"_Yes…_"


End file.
